How to maintain retention of a game?

Help and Feedback Game Design Support
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The game was monetized for a while, especially with advertising. However, there seems to be an issue of maintaining the retention and I am unable to diagnose exactly why the player count dropped from 200 to 0 in a few weeks. What causes the traction to not gain its retention?

In my own thoughts, I believe the underlying issue is the current state of limited game modes as my coding has been brought to an halt for some time. Is there something that we can change about to make it more interesting?

Currently, the game is now a juggernaut mode along with hide and seek. You can either fight the Possessed or hide from it.

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I remember this game, since I checked your portfolio because why not and I saw it was private. Keeping it private for so much time of course will result with less people being interested in your game.

Right now, I checked your game. I wasn’t surprised when I saw I was the only one playing it, since you said nobody likes to play it now, lol. This means I cannot give feedback about the game itself unless somobedy wants to play with me.

In order to maintain a few players, it’d be a great idea to add a Bot mode, where the players have to survive from a bot.

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I remember playing this game a while back when the only weapon was a pistol I believe I saw the cute ghost guy and said why not… but honestly, I forgot what exactly happened.

It’s just not as memorable as other juggernaut style games I have played like the original darkness or the stalker reborn.

Then it hit me the only reason I remember these games was because in these games it was actually possible to solo carry and beat the juggernaut on your own somehow and it made you feel real special that way as well.

I never remember this being the case with Radispook unfortunately as most of the time I was on the survivors team with a basic pistol and just dying. So yeah perhaps focus on improving the primary user experiences 80% most players will be as the survivor and add gameplay elements unique to Radispook. In stalker reborn there was the VIP which I bought because it was really nice having additional abilities and tbh it’s pretty pay to win that way but somehow it’s not that impacing as you could still die to the stalker as normal. For the original Darkness game, the map was a huge aspect of the gameplay mechanic especially for finding better weaponry and such although you could do fine with just a pistol if you had a meatshield.

TL;DR yeah more unique gameplay pls.

Edit: On further analysis also may be multiple factors at play such as the progression system and most importantly the general pacing of the game with how the maps are structured. Round based games can suffer greatly for this aspect so you may need to find a way to shorten rounds if so.

Unfortunately yeah we cannot test the newer version due to the lack of players. I may and definitely have been missing a lot on what has changed from my initial experience of the game so yeah.

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Radispook is heavily inspired by Darkness actually! It was one of my favorite childhood games and it was just sad to see it die. So I wanted to make my own game similar to the style of Darkness. But yeah I was thinking of increasing the Possessed’s Health and lowering the damage of the scythe. Just want to experiment and see if players would like that. Ngl its kinda boring getting almost one shotted. TY for the input!

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Well, here’s one thing that will stay on the list of things to make: AI. If you ever feel the game depends heavily on other players playing it, I’d recommend you make some AI’s to try and keep some players for whenever there’s just not enough. If there’s 0 players in the game, if I join right now I can’t play it at all, I’d need friends to play it and many of my friends are on GTA online or CSGO, and I’m just here with my laptop and my brother is using the gamer pc. If, however, there was an AI that simulates players, that shoots at the clown and tries to escape from it, even if there were 0 players I could play, maybe alone but I could play it. And then, because It appears that I’m playing it, someone can join, play with me and a bunch of other AIs and we can cooperate to make the bots die and have a laugh, then comes someone else, is able to play because we’re here and there are bots, and the game can fill itself because players no longer become a need, just something that can happen.

AI for many roblox games is important, not every game will stay trendy forever, I imagined this was some sort of simulator but it was actually a fleshed out game, if It was a simulator I’d just say that it’s addictive, not engaging, but it’s not that… So, even when there’s very few players in, people should be able to play, there will come times where there’s 0 players, but if that ever happens, there will be an AI to help make the game feel alive, if there wasn’t an AI there it would be really hard, but, like, REEEAAAAALLLY hard to make it get an audience.

Now, for some other ideas I can think of why it can be failing.

First off, the game looks like it has an unique personality.

But…

The lobby is too dark, there are many areas that I just don’t know what will happen if I go there. The lobby is supposed to be a place I can go to and feel safe, but if there’s a lot of darkness in the lobby I just don’t feel safe, even if it’s just a game. There are many areas in the lobby that are dark, some others are also on the maps, which might make for the atmosphere but it should be more balanced to be visible, not just leave me completely blind

I just don’t know what I was supposed to do when the game first started. First thing I do is notice there’s a chat and I say something, I thought the game was bugged or something but it wasn’t, it was on a round that I wasn’t taking part on. Then, when the game starts I do what every noob does: follow the people with cosmetics, and I died. You know what I would do? make a holographic map in the middle of the lobby with white dots representing the ghosts and a red dot representing that evil clown, and these dots move like the players that are playing the match, this way I know there’s a match happening. Make sure that’s one of the main things I catch my eye on, don’t just tell me that’s what it is, show me. Then again, this is an idea…

The game feels more comical than horrorific. You can make a horror game with realistic faces and horrid monsters, or you can make a game with cartoony ghosts and funny jokes. You can also make a balance of both, a game that’s not really trying to be pure horror but nor is it trying to be cartoony, just make it feel balanced. What about this? when the game starts, the players have some time to see the entire maps with shining lights, then, out of nowhere, a lot of the lights shut down and it gets dark…

It feels tedious to just wait, I DONT WANT TO WAIT FOR THE GAME TO START. I would really like to be able to do something while the match is happening, I don’t want to just be waiting. I can chat, but that’s one of the few things I can do, I’d like to make something in the meantime, I don’t know, a small arena where there are bots that try to shoot me and I kill them? a small obby to the top of the tree?

last and definetly least: I’m too old to be playing small roblox games, there’s just other things I’d rather be doing than playing roblox. This is something else, I have gone through the play phase (the phase every child is on) and I’m on the develop phase (the one everybody that grows up is on). This is just personal, but I, as a 17 year old, don’t really feel like playing this game. This can pass on as just something that will happen to the audience, or you can consider it. I’d just let it slide, that’s why it’s the least…

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Yeah after playing a few rounds of the current version being able to luckily find a server of 8 which went down to 3 dedicated players to play with.

Pros:

  1. Cute characters and nice cosmetics

  2. Finally able to kill the juggernaut/possessed at least once pretty satisfying

  3. Amazingly detailed and expansive maps, like the theater.

  4. To my amazement the guns sometimes did work which functioned similarly to stalker reborn being comically inaccurate and frustrating at times but damaging if it works and you go for the kill by walking directly at the juggernaut. Honestly, there should be a sidegrade which is more accurate like in the original darkness where it’s more accurate and if a person has good aim they will be more rewarded.

Cons:

  1. Within the 8 people server waiting for the round was extremely boring, No one wants to watch a boring hide and seek where the one player is hiding behind a box in the corner for 5 minutes.

  2. No incentive for exploration other than to find the gold money exp collectibles due to the fact the maps are DARK you will most likely die in the dark if you go that route being unable to see him coming or meet the beast walking around the corner. The risk and reward just doesn’t matchup. The optimal strategy is to camp in bright lit wide open room in order to see the possessed coming then shoot at it while running away. Honestly, it’s a waste given how expansive and detailed the maps are.

  3. Knife hitbox is eh doesn’t work, moreover, it gets especially worse with jump spamming and latency. Also yeah pistol is comically inaccurate and it feels impossible to control at range, stalker reborn has a recoil system so you can do burst shots even if in the end it was comically inaccurate as well.

  4. I played 30 minutes in and I get no gameplay progress still stuck with the pistol and knife. In stalker reborn, I could have tried out the shotgun and pistol which were fairly cheap only after 5 rounds I believe.

Yeah, I noticed that the maps encourage boring hide and seek gameplay which is the wrong direction it just ends up into a slogfest waiting for the possessed to navigate the complex empty maps like the one with housing with the doors you can go into. Both the darkness, stalker reborn, and even silent assassin that other round-based games encourage the elimination of the juggernaut with a ranking leaderboard to brag how much you did to eliminate the juggernaut which oddly this game doesn’t have, only one text saying who is the MVP at the end.

Yeah, the game is nice but with the odd design choices like promoting hiding, it makes it more waiting than actual gameplay. Really hope this is fixed there’s a lot that ties into it like how easy the maps are to navigate for both the juggernaut and survivors and such.

List of waiting:

  1. Wait for the 30 second round interval where there’s nothing much to do, stalker reborn at least you can look at the 500 cosmetics to buy and stylize and also the gun combinations.

  2. Wait for the juggernaut to find you.

  3. Wait for that one last person hiding in the corner to die.

Edit: Also the default camera setup is pretty frustrating, the camera get’s in the way most of the time as the character takes up the majority center of the screen, it’s difficult to aim this way as well the only optimal thing to do is to go in the first person view. The same goes for the juggernaut. Stalker reborn has a good third-person camera in contrast which is to the top right of the character.

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